This was a big week for Watergate geeks like myself; with anniversaries falling like rain, from the initial break-in and arrests on Monday to today, for which we remember the notorious White House tape so damning that 18 1/2 minutes of it came up conveniently missing. Now, considering what was on the rest of the tapes, that little “stretch” of magnetic gossamer must have been quite something.

Midway through his presidency, when Bob Woodward about how history would judge the War in Iraq, George W. Bush responded: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Instead, in a 2006 essay in Rolling Stone, the prominent historian Sean Wilentz argued that a substantial majority of U.S. historians already considered the Bush administration to be a “failure” (81% in a poll conducted by the History News Network). Wilentz predicted that Bush would “be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”